Writing That Quotes

#1. Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.

Stephen Vincent Benet

#2. When there's writing that you really trust, it's very freeing as an artist.

Matt LeBlanc

#3. Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

#4. I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Annette Bening

#5. When I was younger, I avoided exercise or anything strenuous. I didn't even enjoy walking. As I got older, I spent so much time marking books or sitting at a desk writing that there was no room for exercise - not that I would have bothered anyway.

Maeve Binchy

#6. The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.

Stephen King

#7. Writing that sort of [songs like "Let is Roll"]made me try to almost sort of ingrain it in my own head every time I sing it live as well. It's like therapy. It's like "Move on, Pip! Come on. You can do this! You can do this."

Ladyhawke

#8. There are aspects of writing that require you to image yourself in various roles and guises, to stand in the shoes of others, to 'act' on an inner stage.

James Luceno

#9. It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

Joan Didion

#10. Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

Damon Galgut

#11. The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for.

Robert McKee

#12. When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.

Arthur Hailey

#13. With 'Seven Deadly Sins,' there was a lot of personal stuff in there that I didn't even realize I'd been carrying around for awhile. And a lot of guilt involved, a lot of emotion, a lot of depression. Once I was done writing that book, I was able to really let go of that stuff.

Corey Taylor

#14. You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.

Joss Whedon

#15. People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

Harlan Ellison

#16. I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended.

Christopher Darden

#17. There's definitely a magical quality to writing that can't be explained. I can write something I love in two days, or I can work on a story every day for months and it never comes together.

Mary J. Miller

#18. I write because it is while I'm writing that I feel most connected to why we're here. I write because silence is a heavy weight to carry. I write to remember. I write to heal. I write to let the air in. I write as a practice of listening.

Andrea Gibson

#19. As for the healing, that comes from the writing, from living and writing. That's my catharsis. That's why I never regret sharing because it's part of my healing!

Karrine Steffans

#20. 'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.

Lynda Barry

#21. I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it.

John Shirley

#22. The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.

Linda Lavin

#23. I think when you're 17 and you're angry, you're angry about very short-term things. And there's nothing wrong about writing that record. It's a very real record to write; it's the realest record I could write when I was 17. The problem is, when you're 28, it's not the same thing; it can be a put-on.

Patrick Stump

#24. The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

Jim Woodring

#25. I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way.

Charles Van Doren

#26. People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

Philip K. Dick

#27. Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy - "to stand outside" - comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

Bell Hooks

#28. The amount of writing that people do online is astonishing, and historically unprecedented.

Clive Thompson

#29. You could be anybody when you're writing. That's the reason that I'm writing: to be anybody. You can put your feet in various shoes and experience anything.

Haruki Murakami

#30. One of the themes in my novels is that our crises can turn into blessings. We can feel like our world has crumbled, but ten years down the road when we look back on that time, we can see God's hand at work. I love writing that theme into my books.

Terri Blackstock

#31. This experience of getting so lost in my writing that I lose track of time, or of anything outside the imagined world, is a release for me.

David Ignatius

#32. I have considered the directing, actually. Not so much the writing. That is not really interesting, but the directing is really interesting to me.

Timothy Omundson

#33. For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.

Adam Mansbach

#34. Writing that is not understood is pointless.

Divya Chawla

#35. It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.

Amelie Nothomb

#36. Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

Jeff Lindsay

#37. There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

Eula Biss

#38. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

Ernest Hemingway,

#39. Capote's rejoinder to the Kerouac assertion that he never needed to edit his writing: "That's not writing .That's typing.

Joseph Cavano

#40. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#41. Capote's rejoinder to Kerouac's assertion that he never needed to edit his work ... But, that's not writing . That's typing.

Truman Capote

#42. My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Ishmael Reed

#43. What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Nancy Zafris

#44. I've been acting for so long it's more like - I won't say easy, exactly, but there's not the same angst with writing that comes about with acting. Writing - particularly when you're writing yourself, when it's you, when it's your life, you really can't hide.

Molly Ringwald

#45. I've always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice. But I think that fiction is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create something that feels more true than anything.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#46. Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow's business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.

Walter Russell

#47. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Haruki Murakami

#48. Sometimes I would write while inspired and sometimes I would write through sheer force of will, and in revision the writing that I thought was "dead" very frequently turned out to be better because it was more free of ego.

Jesse Michaels

#49. I can remember sitting in a cabin outside of Denver writing that with a can of soup on the stove.

Gordon Lightfoot

#50. In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.

Hilary Mantel

#51. There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

Alan Dean Foster

#52. Our eyes are not viewers, they're also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing that script, and the working title is 'I'll never be enough'

Jim Carrey

#53. With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

Sylvester Stallone

#54. There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

Chad Harbach

#55. I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.

Ian McEwan

#56. I've learned through writing that if something made me feel deeply or anything at all, it was worth it.

Taylor Swift

#57. This was such bad writing that it was good.

William, Saroyan

#58. Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Joan Didion

#59. People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.

LaToya Jackson

#60. My primary reason for bringing my son on was to have a voice on the show [Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll] that would bring a 25 or 26 year old point of view to it, and my son is very capable of writing that stuff.

Denis Leary

#61. It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.

Gustav Meyrink

#62. All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

William Gibson

#63. I don't go online when I'm writing - that's the devil's workshop - but in general, I'm on there as much as any other global citizen.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#64. Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.

Hallie Ephron

#65. I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

Isabel Allende

#66. There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing.

Dorianne Laux

#67. I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn't poison the writing that I was discovering for myself.

Craig Ferguson

#68. The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.'

Sasa Stanisic

#69. Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.

William Zinsser

#70. I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

Jonathan Lethem

#71. The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#72. I'm not a fan of Dr. Seuss's better-known work, but his fables leave me awe-struck. 'Ten Tall Tales' is a collection of stories where his trademark anarchy is combined with a tautness of writing that shines an affectionate yet uncompromising spotlight on some of the absurdities of human behaviour.

Giles Andreae

#73. At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.

Jonathan Kozol

#74. To be in a position, at my age, where I am financially independent, I can help develop things, I can promote stuff that I believe in, I can say no a lot and spend time writing - that is a gift.

Ellen Page

#75. It's not publishing that matters; it's not writing that matters. What matters is feeling alive while writing, washing dishes, driving, etc. Writing just gives you a solid place to land some of that God energy that is already within you.

Barbara Robinette Moss

#76. The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

Helene Cixous

#77. Is not our purest form of writing that done without the taint of money?

Andrew Barger

#78. I was hesitant to approach people. I'm socially awkward. But I was working on a number of memorials, and finally it dawned on me: These are memorials to people who wrote, so I should use their writing. That's how I started to quit.

Jenny Holzer

#79. It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's fear of not writing well; something quite different.

Scott Berkun

#80. There are many forms of writing that are common, but also very formulaic, such as annual reports or economic studies. In those areas, people would probably be relieved not to have to write those kinds of things because they are mundane and drudgery.

Philip M. Parker

#81. The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.

Rachel Joyce

#82. You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

J. Tillman

#83. Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

Robert Coover

#84. It sometimes happens to me while writing, that I seek a word; mischievous as it is it appears in English, it appears in Arabic, but refuses to come in Hebrew. To some extent I made up my Hebrew. Unquestionably, the influence of Arabic is dominant, my syntax is almost Arabic.

Sami Michael

#85. Comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts - it's a vulgar art, it's one of the people's arts, it's the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form - it's certainly artistry.

George Carlin

#86. Plus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.

Deborah Smith

#87. Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.

Natasha Trethewey

#88. The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

Greg Rucka

#89. You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Virginia Woolf

#90. It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Italo Calvino

#91. There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts.

Jackie DeShannon

#92. You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.

Damian Barr

#93. I'm not saying you can't do writing, just do some writing that you can build a career on. Creative writing isn't going to get you anywhere.

Francesca Zappia

#94. I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.

Stephen King

#95. She nodded, jotting something in her notebook.
You're writing that down? Has the interview started?
Lee, whenever you're talking to a reporter, you're being interviewed.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#96. Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

Etgar Keret

#97. It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

Rachel Cusk

#98. Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

Bill Callahan

#99. One of the things about writing that inspires
and impresses me, is the music words can make. And, like music, the spaces between the notes can mean as much as the notes themselves.
The Jesus Horse

Melinda West Seifert

#100. Not that a poem can "hurt" someone the same way a physical blow can or even a mean remark can ... I just felt unsure that my tone would be taken the right way and/or unsure of my own writing, that I couldn't maintain the tone I wanted.

Denise Duhamel